Support for Virtual and Physical Drives
This section lists the types of disks that can be used by Parallels virtual machines and provides information about basic operations you can perform on these disks.
Supported Types of Hard Drives
Parallels virtual machines can use virtual hard drives, Boot Camp partitions, or physical drives as their hard disks.
Virtual Hard Drives
The capacity of a virtual hard drive can be set from 100 MB to 2 TB. When you create a virtual machine, the disk is created in an expanding format, which means that you can continue installing applications and downloading movies, music, etc. The disk will grow in size proportionally.
Boot Camp Partitions
Physical Drives
Parallels Desktop allows you to connect physical drives directly to virtual machines as internal disks. When connected this way, physical drives work faster than via USB. You can either boot virtual machines from such drives or connect them as secondary and work with the drive data.
Optical Drives and Disc Images
Parallels Desktop can access real drives and images of CD/DVD/BD discs.
Parallels Desktop has no limitations on using multi-session CD/DVD discs. A virtual machine can play back audio CDs without any limitations on copy-protected discs.
If your Mac has a recording optical drive, you can use it to burn optical discs from a virtual machine.
Parallels Desktop supports disc images in the ISO, CUE, and CCD formats.
Note: DMG disk images made with macOS Disk Utility are also supported by Parallels Desktop. When creating such an image, make sure you create a read-only and uncompressed image without any encryption.
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